Knit clothing articles are well known and ubiquitous around the globe. Such clothing is made from fabric that is manufactured by knitting yarn according to well known techniques. As is also well known, such clothing articles become worn after repeated use, eventually to the point of no longer being useful. Traditionally, methods of extending the useful lifetime of clothing articles include, for example, providing reinforcing or additional material in known high-wear areas of an article of clothing. Such material includes, for example, patches of other fabric, leather, or synthetic material placed in the high-wear areas.
One type of fabric that is well known and highly durable is felt. Felt is a non-woven cloth that is produced by matting, condensing and pressing wool fibers. Felt may be used in a variety of applications, including garments and construction materials. Felt is made by a process called felting, where natural wool fiber is stimulated by friction and lubricated by moisture (such as soapy water), using the inherent nature of wool, the fibers of which have directional scales on them. The fibers also have kinks in them, and the combination of scales and kinks reacts to the stimulation of friction, and causes the phenomenon of felting. Felting tends to work well with wool fibers as their scales, when aggravated, bond together to form a cloth.
Knitted woolen garments which shrink in a hot machine wash can be said to have felted or fulled. Felting differs from fulling in the sense that fulling is done to fabric whereas felting is done to fibers that are not in fabric form, although the term felting is often used colloquially to refer to either process. A clothing article, for example, that is knitted using wool yarn, and is then washed, will shrink significantly from the fulling process. Fulling is an example of how the fibers bond together when combined with the movement of the washing machine, the heat of the water, and the addition of soap. The fabric from either process may be referred to as felt or as having been felted. As used herein, the term felt or felted is used to refer to fabric that has been through the felting or fulling process.
As is well known, in many cases it is not desirable for a garment to become felted. To help reduce or eliminate any felting that can occur in garments, and allow for a user to machine wash such garments, wool fibers can be treated to reduce or eliminate the tendency for garments made from wool to felt. Such treatment is referred to as superwashing, and wool fibers that are subjected to superwashing may be spun into yarn or other threads. Such yarn or thread is referred to as superwash yarn, or superwash wool. In cases where yarn or thread is spun from wool fibers that have not had such treatment, such yard is referred to as non-superwash yarn or non-superwash wool.